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I Want More Money: What Industry Should I Choose?

In this series, I’ve embarked on an expedition to explore and filter through data from Global Knowledge’s eighth annual IT Skills and Salary Report to discover correlations in situations where professionals report a higher income. To aid in my data conquest of the over 16,300 respondents, I’ve broken down the numbers to represent the differences (and similarities) between IT and non-IT professionals. Although both parties are represented in my posts, the report’s survey gathering focused on IT professionals, and so in most cases, the response rate of non-IT professionals is below statistical standards and proves difficult to show its significance.

Wouldn’t it be nice to change industries and immediately make more money? Are you curious to see how your salary compares to others in your industry?

In this post, I’ve broken down the top and the not-so-on-top industries to work in, based on the average reported salary.Even if you work in a specific industry, you’re not guaranteed to earn that salary, and results among different individuals will always vary. You could earn more, or less, than the reported amount depending on other factors like tenure, management level, location, job function, company size and experience. When comparing the data below to our report averages, note that the mean overall salary for IT respondents is $88,323, and $101,680 for non-IT respondents for those who provided their current employer’s industry.

Top 10 Industries: 1–10

Coming in as the number-one industry is VAR, Information System Integration for IT respondents, and Professional Business Services for non-IT respondents. Overall, these top 10 industries for both IT and non-IT professionals rank 4–21% above the mean average among all respondents.

The large difference between the percentages ranking above the mean average (4–21%) among top 10 derives from the large range between the number one response and number 10.

Average Industries: 11–23

The next 13 industries are middle of the pack in average reported salary among respondents. Similar to our top 10 industries, there’s an overlap of over 50% identical industries on both the IT and non-IT professionals side for spots 11-20, demonstrating the importance of industry in relation to salary for these types of professional employees.

Although the salaries of respondents working in these industries start above mean earnings, salary figures also drop below the overall reported average salary for both IT and non-IT professionals within this group. Number 14 (VAR, Information System Integration) is the first industry to average below the mean non-IT professional’s salary of $101,680. For IT professionals, the drop below the average of $88,323 occurs farther down the list at number 17, Science (non-bio).

Additionally, the range between numbers 11 and 23 in this group is much smaller when compared to the top 10, showing a more consistent average among these industries.

Bottom Industries: 24–35

These industries ranked last for average reported salaries among respondents. As reported in the previous blog post “I Want More Money: Where Should I Live?” — most of the lower-ranking industries had the least amount of respondents for both IT and non-IT professionals, making the data less statistically significant and impossible to formulate accurate conclusions.

If you’re looking for average earnings in the last two industries for non-IT professionals, you’ll have to do some research because our survey reported zero respondents for “HR and Staffing” and “Other Services” industry categories.

Given the numerous security breaches afflicting many organizations recently, the Data Security industry comes in last on the list of average salary for IT professionals (additionally, coming in with a low number of respondents). One can only hope that with the low numbers and salary, most companies function with an in-house data security team in lieu of outsourcing to companies specializing in data security.

This overarching look at industries provides a somewhat clear and accurate depiction of potential earnings for IT and non-IT professionals. In all instances, an average doesn’t represent the whole, so I recommend finding an online forum such as the My Community forums inside MyGK, to connect with professionals in your field and ask about specific job functions within the industry and their average earnings.